The Starbound Trailer just dropped and is pretty awesome. The trailer shows off some early game, building and some other stuff we haven't seen before like mechs, random dungeons and later game tech weapons and gear.

Starbound beta drops tomorrow at 10am PST. Join the Cheerful Ghost event and take part in the discussion about the game and chime in with your thoughts.

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/events/45

Like many of you, I have heard about Lucas Pope's latest game "Papers, Please" and after seeing it in the recent Steam Autumn Sale, I decided to pick it up. The game is very unique and if you are looking for a twitch shooter or MOBA, this ain't it. Papers, Please is a game where you take the role of the immigration inspector on the border reviewing people for entry into the communist state of Arstotzka. You are randomly selected in the state lottery for this job and your family is uprooted and moved to the border. You get money each day by processing people. If you take too long doing your job, you process less people and get less money. If you can't afford heat or food, you family will get sick and may die. If you can't pay your rent you will be thrown in jail.

Papers, Please offers you choices and each choice has an impact that isn't always easy to forsee. In one game, I took a bribe that later got me arrested. In one game, I was moving so slowly I couldn't make rent and was thrown into prison. At one point, a man told me him and his wife were immigrating and that I "should treat her kindly." She didn't have the correct papers and when I let her through, I got a citation that led to a fine.

Papers, Please is a great game in that as I played it I considered what the "right thing to do" was and then what would be the best thing for my family. It's also a strange thing to force someone into a body scanner and analyze the results. On one hand, we have the privacy invasion of body scanners but on the other hand, terrorists are blowing things up at your checkpoint.

Papers, Please is a game I recommend if you are looking for a unique experience that strays away from typical video game tropes. I wasn't sure it was possible to create an exciting game about working at the border of a small communist country, but Papers, Please does it for the glory of Arstotzka!

Solarus is an Open Source Zelda-like 2D game engine. The Solarus engine was built to help people create Zelda like games and the Solarus project released its first game "Zelda Mystery of Solarus" with it.

"The Legend of Zelda: Mystery of Solarus DX is set to be a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES, using the same graphics and game mechanisms. Zelda Mystery of Solarus DX is the first game made with the Solarus engine and in fact, Solarus was primarily designed for this game."

If you are interested in making your own Zelda game or if you are just interested in playing a fan Zelda game directly after the events of Link to the Past, give Solarus a shot.

The Solarus project and Zelda Mystery of Solarus is available for free on Windows, Mac and Linux.

http://www.solarus-games.org/

"Festival of Magic is a throwback to the classic Japanese RPGs of yore, but puts a spin on the formula by fusing harvesting with turn-based combat.

In the game you join Amon, a desert scavenger, and his reluctant companion Gnart, as they unravel the ancient mysteries of Umbra - a world that has stopped spinning and is now divided by the forces of technology and magic.

The game combines turn-based combat and farming gameplay with exploration and puzzle-packed quests. Grow spuds, tend barnacles and use your harvest as powerful ammunition and spells; load your weapons, team up your companions and get ready for a grand adventure!"

One great part of the new indie game movement is that there are many more independent developers making games that don't get a lot of attention. For years, Squaresoft and a few other companies were the only ones making turn based RPG games. Festival of Magic is a upcoming game by Snowcastle Games that puts a modern spin on the turn based RPG game by adding crafting and farming to the core game.

Festival of Magic will shop on Mac, Linux and Windows and so far no date has been set. They are looking for 250k and have raised 45k of that goal, so if you are interested in funding the game it would make a difference.

The Starbound Beta drops in 2 days and like many of you, I am very excited. A few Let's Players have received early beta access and have posted up several videos and I want to break down a few things that will help you out through the first missions of Starbound.

First thing you will do is get your first quest and collect your starting items from your ship chest. You start with a sword, flashlight, 10 torches, matter manipulator and some seeds. After you land you will want to chop down some trees and get some cobblestone with the matter manipulator. The matter manipulator is a cool tool that basically can chop down trees & dig up stuff except it does is very slowly. So the first thing you will want to do is collect wood and cobblestone to make a crafting table then craft a pickaxe. After you have the pickaxe, head back and mine more cobble stone and then craft the axe and hoe. From there you can use the hoe to till up the ground to plant seeds and chop down trees much faster with the axe.

The quest system will guide you through many of the basics, including crafting a bow to kill animals to roasting them on your fire. I am not entirely certain how far the beta quests take you through the game, but most of the Let's Play videos that have surfaced so far end at the same quest where you craft a furnace.

Paradise Lost: First Contact was successfully funded at double its original goal. It sailed through a few stretch goals to get achievements, language translations and a secret chapter 1. It was a few thousand short of hitting the graphic improvements goal but to be fair, I love the games graphics as they are.

The above video shows off how you can complete the same area using different strategies and after watching it am more excited about it coming out. Paradise Lost: First Contact will release December 2014 on Linux, Mac & Windows.

"It’s been two months since alpha 14, with Chris taking time out to have a baby. Whilst he’s been away the rest of the Introversion team have stepped up to provide a series of awesome updates to the game.

Gary has extended the staff simulation so that all staff now become tired as they work. After a while you’ll see their nameplate showing “tired” or “exhausted”, and they’ll be forced to stop work and rest. He’s added a Staff Room to the game, along with some sofas and drinks machines, which you should add to your prisons somewhere appropriate. Staff will recover faster and will feel more rested for longer if they have a staff room to go to.

And then there’s a bit of a wildcard in this version : Leander has added a Mod system, to better support community made mods. We don’t really know where this will go, but we’ll be watching the community closely to see what people do with it. Without any official support our community has already translated the game into Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Italian, Polish and Turkish (Visit our wiki to download these translations), and they’ve produced mods which add tons of new Grants to the game. With this new official mod system it is now much easier to activate and deactivate those mods in game - and you can run any number of mods simultaneously. You’ll no longer need to hack the game files directly to make a mod work."

Alpha 15 is a solid release that drops some really awesome features on the game such as mod support, staff rooms and some serious in game optimizations. I hope that they integrate the mod support with the Steam Workshop at some point as I really dig the Steam Workshop integration they currently have.

Have you checked out the Alpha 15? What do you think of it?

RetroLiberty posted a great video covering history of the classic NES game Contra and the top games in the series. Contra is a very tough game, but I never viewed it as on of the hardest games on the NES. Ninja Turtles, Blaster Master and Little Nemo were all _much_ harder than Contra.

That said, the game was difficult and ... you know maybe I did play each and every game starting with the Konami code. No regrets, had fun.

I want to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving(if you celebrate it) and wish you a very video game playing holiday. And, if you are lucky enough to be, what games you will be playing?

Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3 does count!

"Dropsy is a clown. A very, um, not nice looking clown. I think I love him. He has a puppy and he draws his own, poorly painted face on everything – including said loyal canine companion. TV and my nightmares tell me that ours is a world full of sad clowns just trying to get by/devour my heart with crooked, yellow teeth, but Dropsy is an irrepressibly joyful clown in a sad situation. His family’s circus has been burnt to the ground, and he’s gone from local, animal-whispering hero to scrap-collecting outcast. His game, then, is a point-and-click adventure that wields sorrow in one hand and gut-busting humor in another, with a fascinating open-world structure gluing everything together. The personality is strong in this one."

Dropsy was just successfully Kickstarted but I only recently learned about it. Really great to see this game get funded because it's a pretty atypical adventure game premise. I really enjoy how the Dropsy's mental abilities shape how the game interacts with you. I haven't played very many modern adventure games and Dropsy looks like a great game to bring me back into the genre.

Dropsy will launch on Linux, Mac and PC sometime at the end of 2014.